A Literary Legacy: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mother and Daughter

Abstract

The theme of a woman's right to self-fulfillment was the literary legacy that Stuart Phelps left at her death to her eight-year-old daughter who was later to be known by her mother's name. Both mother and daughter were popular authors of nineteenth-century New England, but the narrow and ambivalent feminism suggested in the works of the mother (1815-1852) was embraced and eventually enhanced in selected works by the daughter (1844-1911). One of the clear marks of the daughter's broader feminism is her unqualified belief in right to achievement and fulfillment. In their attention to needs and rights the Phelpses were reacting against the feudal view of women' typical of their community, Andover, Massachusetts.1 Both were daughters of faculty members of the Andover Theological Seminary which had been founded in 1808 to preserve the Calvinist orthodoxy of a patriarchal Congregational clergy.2 Both attended Abbot Academy, itself founded to train future wives of Andover graduates to be apt critics of their husbands' sermons. Instead, as authors, both Phelpses became critics of the lives of New England ministers' wives and daughters.3 Although their lives overlapped for only eight years, the mother's life and work was to become material for the daughter's novels, novels more insistently expansive and critical of women's sphere than were her mother's. Of her mother's influence the daughter observed in her 1896 autobiography, eight years of age a child cannot be expected to know her mother intimately, and is hard for me always to distinguish between the effect produced upon me by her literary success as I have since understood it, and [the effect] left by her own truly extraordinary personality upon the annals of the nursery (Chapters, p. 11). The mother seemed to the daughter a being of power and importance in the (Chapters, p. 14), and with such an example it was as natural for her daughter to write as to breathe (Chapters, p. 12). The first identifiable publication of the mother was in 1851, the last occurred posthumously in 1853.4 At best, then, her public career lasted three years. Unlike her daughter, she concealed her identity behind the pseudonym H. Trusta, an anagram of Stuart. In 1891 the younger Phelps wrote of her mother: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was well past thirty before either the home or the world found out that she was destined to be anything other than the homekeeper, but genius was in her, and would out.... A wife, a mother, a housekeeper, a hostess, in delicate health, on an academic salary, undertakes a deadly load when she starts upon a literary career. She lifted to her frail shoulders, and she fell beneath it.,5 In fact the mother had suffered intermittent illness from the age of sixteen when she completed formal schooling. Her daughter attributed this onset of illness at the end of schooling to the resulting cessation of stimulation, a view similar to the present